Pop Music: August 2005 Archives
In 1991, the biggest album of the decade was released, Nirvana's Nevermind, as well the endlessly lauded Loveless by My Bloody Valentine and also big albums from The Pixies, REM, Slint. So, what album did Spin Magazine pick for its best album of 1991? Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque. It's true. Look it up. They were this mega buzz band. They performed on SNL with Jason Priestly hosting. Magazines called them the next big thing. Pitchfork would've said they were "Best new Music" if Pitchfork would've existed. Alas, Pitchfork didn't exist, and alas Teenage Fanclub was not the next big thing. They continued to make albums that I loved, but critics didn't. They sorta slowly faded away like a old photograph. They put out a quality record every few years, and each time it features at least a few brilliant pop songs. I think that critics sometimes get bitter at dudes who are dependable and not rock'n'roll enough.
It pisses me off, though. Teenage Fanclub is such a special band. It features 3 songwriters who all provide at least 3 tracks per album of amazingly crafted pop music. They are like the Scottish Crosby Stills and Nash but less burnt out and lesbian impregnating and TFC actually have more good albums that CSN. The thing is, if you don't pay very very close attention you wouldn't realize that it is 3 different people penning the music and 3 different people singing the songs. In other cases like Pavement or Guided by Voices where the songwriting was shared, the difference between the writers is very obvious and there is quite a quality difference between the songwriters, but in Fanclub all three dudes (Gerard Love, Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley) are incredible pop music craftsmen. Flat out, there has never been a more ignored and underrated band ever.
They started in Glasgow in the extremely late 80s as the Boy Hairdressers, becoming Teenage Fanclub in 1989. They released their amazing pre grunge debut disc A Catholic Education in 1990. It put every one into a tizzy with its thick guitars, swirling sludge mixed with pop sensibilities. The band was almost immediately scooped up by a major label. Within a year they released the best album of 1991, Bandwagonesque. It was a perfect album, sad and sharp and a little snotty but also forlorn and beautiful. The album opener, "The Concept" absolutely sounds like the early 90s. It's a song about being cool, which sounds trite, but really that's all what we want to hear sometimes. These first two albums Teenage Fanclub was truly "cool." It's really bizarre and intangible, but it exists there in those albums, and ever since then they haven't had that cool....only the amazing songs.
Two years later TFC released Thirteen, which is named after a Big Star song. It was panned and dismissed immediately by the critics. I don't get it. I think it is my favorite TFC album. The emotion on Thirteen run deeper. They lost that snot (which is maybe what made them "cool" but certainly not what made them "good") and brought a deeper sincerity and heaviness. Grand Prix was released in '95 and was met slightly more warmly than Thirteen and was hailed with terms like "concise." It, of course, has a few mind blowing perfect pop songs, but it's second half is a little lacking.
Like the dependable fellows they are, TFC retruned exactly 2 years later with Songs From Northern Britain an album that saw TFC lose the crunchy guitars for the most part, and they showed their 60s pop influence much more than before, especially in production. The album is a beautfiul tribute to their homeland of Scotland, and the art for the album was filled with beautiful pictures the band took of rural Scotland. Another brilliant looked over album that without fail makes me feel so good by just listening to its very precise and personal pop music.
Howdy! was released in 2000 after much label difficulty, and it was an album that never stood out to me, but listening to it now it sounds better than it ever did. TIMELESS MUSIC, PEOPLE! I'm telling you. Just this year the Fannies have released their 7th proper studio album, Man-Made, and it is another very enjoyable album. It's remarkable how they keep doing it. I'm sure the band has been pressured to make some drastic change to their sound to get the critics buzzing. People thought that due to the fact that they were recording with Tortoise's John McEntire that Man-Made would sound like Stereolab or post rock or whatever, but it doesn't, it sounds like Teenage Fanclub. McEntire did a great job and there are a few touches that you can tell are McEntire, but he did not alter the band. It's also not that TFC sounds stale at all, the sound slowly changes. All the records do sound different, but in the fickle world of independent rock music people want to see artists make bold moves that are possible genius or career killers. It's just people wanting a good drama/trajedy and not being happy with amazing music.
I might have missed my chance. I have seen lots of shows, and I have seen almost all my favorite bands. I feel pretty fulfilled as a music fan, but just last week I missed a show by Teenage Fanclub which was only 3 hours away. I feel stupid. I have never seen them play. TFC and Willie Nelson are the only two bands that I still need to see to feel like I have seen everything I need to see in my musical life. I BLEW IT! I blew my chance of seeing a band that has so many great pop songs in the last 15 years I'm giving you a full albums worth today (sorry for the overwhelming amount, I just can't say no to sharing these beauties). I blew my chance at seeing the Greatest Band of All Time.
There are bands whose genius inspires me to want to create something lasting and great and moving and relevant and personal and beautiful--one perfect thing that will make all of my futile toiling on this planet seem remotely worthwhile. There are other bands whose greatness just infuriates me to the point that I never want to touch an instrument again. And then there are bands like The Curtains, who walk a line between these two extremes so thin that only the Greatest Band In the World could possibly traverse it. Because Curtains--at their best--create the music of my dreams, and that I could never dream to make.
Initially a partnership between Californians Chris Cohen and Trevor Shimizu (then called Dynathought Imagination Band), The Curtains took shape in earnest sometime between 2000-2001 when the duo absorbed drummer Jamie Peterson into the fold. This line-up dissolved almost entirely following the limited release of the LP Fast Talks, leaving Cohen--then also a member of Natural Dreamers--alone to his own devices in pursuit of the project. It was roughly around this same time that Cohen was asked to join a little band by the name of Deerhoof--this immediately following the release of that band's critically acclaimed breakthrough, Reveille. It's at this point, of course, that--in spite of chronology--Curtains immediately became relegated to the status of Deerhoof side project, an appraisal only aided by Deerhoof founder Greg Saunier's new-found membership in the band.
With drummer Andrew Maxwell (L.A.'s Open City), the new lineup recorded "Flybys"--a 23 song LP of jumpy, playful, largely instrumental half-thoughts that clocks in at just over a half hour; nine songs not even cresting the nine-minute mark. "Flybys"--which seems to limit the band largely to Cohen's single guitar, Maxwell's stammering percussion, and Saunier's hiccuped blurts from a Radioshack Moog--is stuffed painfully full of dissonant, careful conceptualism that, in spite of a great number of overall successes, never seems to gel quite right.
Following the release of "Flybys", Curtains took a brief West Coast jaunt with Japan's brilliant Maher Shalal Hash Baz (which, by the way, was one of the most inspiring shows I've ever had the fortune of attending), whose joyful pop experimentalism seemed to have a profound effect on the band's creative process. Following the release of Deerhoof's stellar Apple'O, the band cranked out Vehicles of Travel--an absolutely brilliant record which finds Curtains diving headlong into pop waters in 23 beautifully melodic vignettes. As far as experimentalists go, Curtains had always been surprisingly buoyant, but with Vehicles, the band hits a virtually perfect semblance of intentionally clunky experimental composition and nostalgic pop craft. Contextually, the songs often ring with a sort of wistful PBS jingle purity, with singing on roughly half of the songs--perhaps a turn off to fans of the band's previous, more challenging work, but a boon for bored pop obsessives like myself. Vehicles is a great deal more of a proper album that the band's previous recordings--unlike it's predecessors, who were mostly just recorded representations of the way the songs were performed live, the album's textures and layers a composed in large part during the recording process--a working method that, though apparently very taxing on the band, works to great effect.
At last I checked in with Chris, Curtains are on an indefinite hiatus as Deerhoof continues to dominate the free world--but if Vehicles is any indication, I can only pray that it's not the last we hear from the Greatest Band Of All Time.
